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Will insistence that WalMart is as consequential as the Federal Reserve in containing inflation reflects a conceptual confusion. Measures of ‘inflation’ are calculated through surveys of retail prices, but the term refers to a increase in the price level of the whole sum of traded goods and services, increases derived from the effects of changes in the quantity of money intermediated through the real economy. WalMart is not yet capable of influencing as a matter of policy the quantity of the cash or demand deposits or time deposits in the economy.

There is a hypothesis that Will neglects to which Mr. Steagall refers to only obliquely, which is that the sensible experience of social relations undertaken in the course of retail trade may be thought of as a common property resource that can be degraded by the unregulated activity of self-interested agents (as in a denuded fishery). Looking at the habitat in which retail trade takes place now in comparison to that in the much less affluent society of 1948 should induce some skepticism about the capacity of markets as currently regulated to capture the whole portfolio of costs and benefits in contemporary developments in this area.

Will also seems to assume that the only things which influence the utility levels of working people consist of merchanise which can be readily traded.

Will recently accepted an invitation to speak before an audience at the Cato Institute. That seems the place for him nowadays.

Walmart has increased the amount of disposable income in a huge number of homes in the world. Will someone please tell me the honor and virture in paying 20 percent more for my Tide and Crest toothpast at Target, or the local grocery store?

The brief answer, Miss Beuge, is that a price should be just, and prices can be unjust by being too low as much as by being too high. If a firm is able to offer low prices by underpaying its workers, then its prices are unjust.

Of course, this answer needs fleshing out, and involves the whole way we look at economic activity and its purposes, etc.

I think one could get in a terrible morass attempting to come up with an operational definition of ‘just price’ or ‘just wage’.

Mrs. Beuge:
Rather than evaluate your individual transactions, one might ask whether or not the full portfolio of costs and benefits to the society are captured in that transaction and whether or not market failures are being addressed as best they can by local governments responsible for the regulation of land use. Unremarked costs incorporated into the efficiencies of scale and stereotyped ways of operation characteristic of WalMart would be the effects on same of the aesthetic properties of the built environment and the effect on the fabric of the common life of augmenting the proportion of the local business community who are not locally routed or working on their own account.

An economist might say that no salient externalities or analogues to common property resources are in play here. Certainly one could say that the prosperity of WalMart reflects a considered decision by much of the public against the benefits of sociability in the course of mundane commerce which my mother was able to enjoy 40 years ago. Economists are leery of making normative evaluations of peoples’ preferences, but the rest of us are not bound by that reserve and neither are economists when they are thinking and writing in some other capacity.
Back in the day, Dr. Will would not have regarded the fact that there is a market for snuff films as trump in a discussion of the desirability of trade in same.

Given that in our economy the measruable quantum of goods and services produced (per capita) trebles every fifty or sixty years, and given the fairly weak relation ‘twixt ‘output’ and a truly valuable satisfaction in life, to adjudicate in favor of more merchandise seems perverse to some of us (whether the source of that judgments is in market structure regulated by local politics or in cultural and social-psychological evolution).